By Olatunji Ololade
Modern Nigeria, drained of compassion, is mortally dead. As the Coronavirus aka COVID-19 spreads among the citizenry, the government’s cold-walled corridors remain evidently passionless.
Cold, spectral personae, spanning the various State Houses and government agencies, parade pitiless game faces, like itinerant gamblers, whose rule of time is enforced by immoderate lust, greed, Mammon and death.
Save the doctors, nurses, janitors, pharmacists, store-keepers, and other health workers, slugging it out every day, in a perilous fight, Nigeria may be worse off in its fight against COVID-19.
It was a given that the rate of infection would escalate and the figures would incite alarm among the citizenry. As you read, more people are getting infected, more are taking their last gasps in the vice-grip of COVID-19.
Raging at China over coronavirus would do us no good. After all, the federal government, moving against the tide of reason and protest by Nigerian doctors, brought in Chinese doctors, purportedly to help fight the coronavirus – even while the country suffered no severity in terms of the scourge. The jury is out on the wisdom of the government’s decision amid the toxicity of ineffectual leadership.
It’s about time we scrutinised our own government. How sincere is the Nigerian government in its ‘fight’ against COVID-19? If the federal government is truly sincere in its campaign against the virus, why did it rule out, until recently, the possibility of looking inwards for a cure?
Why did some state governments go through the trouble of purchasing fumigation tools and publicise intent to disinfect their domain’s public places only to desert the initiative shortly after?
Why did the government fail to seize the opportunity of the lockdown to repair the country’s bad road network, given that, bad roads cause vehicular traffic, and protracted hold-ups manifest dangerously as contamination points?
There are issues of compassion and efficiency. The government has so far, botched medical and social intervention programmes meant to alleviate the impact of the pandemic on vulnerable segments of the population.
Its scandalous lack of vision and cowardice in fighting the pandemic has so far, incited citizenry angst and conspiracy theories of government’s insincerity in fighting the virus.
In fighting the pandemic, I reiterate that the Nigerian government must look inwards and explore the innumerable opportunities offered by traditional, herbal medicine.
If they won’t, medical NGOs and civil societies must unite in finding affordable, alternative traditional therapy in treating COVID-19. The preventive and curative therapy generated thereby would serve the interest of millions of Nigerians, who stand the risk of untimely death by the disease, due to lack of a functional health system, lack of bed spaces, and a cruel government.
Madagascar’s COVID-Organics may yet be Africa’s major elixir in fighting COVID-19 and ridding the continent of its scourge. This is hardly the time for intellectual subterfuge and random bullying by the government of brilliant scientists and advocates of traditional herbal medicine. It is time to seek synergy between western medicine and traditional herbal medicine.
Last week, I mentioned how China evolved Artemisinin as a potent antimalarial drug. Known in Chinese as qinghaosu, and derived from the sweet wormwood (Artemisia annua L.), Artemisinin was only one of several hundred substances discovered by a young Chinese medical researcher, Tu Youyou.
Jia-Chen Fu, Assistant Professor of Chinese, Emory University states in a piece for Conversation Africa, that, Tu and her team were recruited as part of Project 523, by the Chinese government. Project 523 was a covert operation launched to fight chloroquine-resistant malaria, and Tu and her team culled from Chinese drugs and folk remedies to evolve one of the most powerful and effective antimalarial drug therapy to date.
The original three-year plan produced by the People’s Liberation Army Research Institute aimed to integrate Chinese and Western medicines while taking Chinese drugs as its priority.
Highlighting the significance of the Project 523, Jia-Chen Fu notes that it had three goals: the identification of new drug treatments for fighting chloroquine-resistant malaria, the development of long-term preventative measures against chloroquine-resistant malaria, and the development of mosquito repellents.
To achieve these ends, research on Chinese drugs and acupuncture was integral. The decision to investigate Chinese drugs was not without precedent, however. Back in 1926, Chen Kehui and Carl Schmidt of the Peking Union Medical College published their original paper on ephedrine, derived from Chinese herb mahuang. It inspired more than 500 scientific papers on ephedrine (for asthma relief) around the world by 1929.
In the 1940s, the interest in the Chinese drug changshan and its antimalarial properties led to the establishment of a state-funded research institute and experimental farm in Sichuan province. Project 523’s embrace of Chinese materia medica – the traditional body of knowledge about substances’ healing properties – is a more recent example of the efforts to “scientize” Chinese medicine through selective appropriation and detailed investigation.
This ensured that qinghao research proceeded within a climate in which scientists, “who themselves had learnt the ways of appreciating traditional knowledge, worked side by side with historians of traditional medicine, who had textual learning.”
Nigeria may emulate the Chinese model exploring the benefits of synergy between western and traditional herbal medicine. So doing, appropriate processing and dose regulation must be sought to improve drug efficacy and reduce drug toxicity.
Considerable amounts of data can be acquired through clinical experiments, but is Nigeria fully equipped for such a venture, given its significance in the development of modern drugs?
Through its use of natural products, traditional medicine, according to health experts, offers merits over other forms of medicine in the discovery of lead compounds and drug candidates, examination of drug-like activity, and toxicological characteristics among others.
In recent years, traditional medicine has gradually gained considerable approval as complementary or alternative medicine in Western countries. Chinese herbal medicine, for instance, is currently used in the health care of an estimated 1.5 billion people worldwide.
It should be noted that in traditional medicine, several herbs and ingredients are combined according to strict rules to form prescriptions, which are referred to as formulas (fang ji in Chinese). Commonly, a classic formula is composed of four elements—the “monarch”, “minister”, “assistant”, and “servant”—according to their different roles in the formula, each of which consists of one to several drugs. Ideally, these drugs constitute an organic group to produce the desired therapeutic effect and reduce adverse reactions.
At its foray into the country, COVID-19 capitalised on Nigeria’s underlying conditions and exploited them ruthlessly. A corrupt political class, a dysfunctional health system, and a disillusioned citizenry.
It took the scale and intimacy of the pandemic, as Nesrine Malik, would say, to expose the severity of our shortcomings and shock us with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category.
The crisis demanded a swift, lucid, response but the government reacted with institutionalised lethargy and pitilessness; cruelly leaving the borders open as a leadership deadened to the finer aspects of tact, reason, and responsibilities of a visionary government.
The unfolding dystopia calls for urgent intervention by well-meaning Nigerians and civil societies in the interest of the collective. The presiding oligarchs lack the maturity, native intelligence, and wisdom to curtail the spread of COVID-19.
They lack the tact required to drive Nigeria up the path of rebirth and progress.
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